Comments on: ActionScript 3 : Get a Class Reference by Class Name

By: Veeru

Veeru — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:53:34 +0000

How about to use the event handlers and item renders in the UI components added using reflection concept.

Can we load UI based on a xml compleletly by this reflection alone with out writing any code for handlers and other stuffs.

Thanks in advance,
Veeru

By: gregbown

gregbown — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:31:42 +0000

Great tip! Thank you! I used this to instantiate movie clips in an application that gets the names from XML. Since I have no idea how many backgrounds the designers may want.

public function init(name:String):void {
var ref:Class = getDefinitionByName(name) as Class;
var background:MovieClip = new ref as MovieClip;
addChild(background as DisplayObject);
}

By: code handyman

code handyman — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:05:20 +0000

senocular to the rescue! For me what this did was allow me to create a bunch of “filter classes” that I can apply and basically abstract the look of button classes away from their functionality, and some member of our team can manage the filter classes independently of the button class, except for registering the variables.

Suggestion for Adobe is simply adding a switch to the .* wildcard like myClasses.*-ForceAll or something. Then we, the coders could decide instead of Adobe deciding for us whether or not to have classes in our code, although that would clearly pave the way for some pretty sloppy stuff and I can see why they would be leery as flash already gets a bad rap because of crummy flash code out there.

By: Harold Brenes

Harold Brenes — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:20:54 +0000

Pardon me, it seems that the comments strip away any text containing html-style tags.

The example provided is supposed to be:

[includes]
[symbol]yourpackage.YourClass[/symbol]
[symbol]yourpackage.YourOtherClass[/symbol]>
[/include]

Note that the node is not a child of [compiler] the node.

Of course, substitute ‘[‘ brackets with the html-style tag ones, as you would use in your xml coonfig file.

By: Harold Brenes

Harold Brenes — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:14:42 +0000

Its worth mentioning, for people who prefer to use a ‘cleaner’ coding style, that you can use the flex compiler option “includes” to explicitly include classes in your swf, whether they are referenced or not. This way, you don’t have to declare any variables on your code.

I usually use a config file instead of the command line, here’s an example:

yourpackage.YourClass
yourpackage.YourOtherClass

Note that the node is not a child of the node.

With this done, you won’t need to declare any instances of the classes you’d like to reference dynamically by using util.getDefinitionByName() or ApplicationDomain.getDefinition().

By: Jeremy Daley

Jeremy Daley — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:20:23 +0000

Sergey, I don’t believe what you’re asking is possible, because “Sprite” in a string representation could belong to:
flash.display.Sprite

or any other custom “Sprite” class path you’ve written:
com.sergey.custom.Sprite

You can, however, get the fully qualified class path of a Sprite object:
var classPath:String = getQualifiedClassName(new Sprite())

By: Sergey

Sergey — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:55:43 +0000

Hello

Please help me brothers. How can I get the entire class path by class name in actionscript 3. For instance `

var className:String = ‘Sprite’;
var package:String = getPackage(className);

Is there such a technic?
Thanks in advance

By: Ajitpal

Ajitpal — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:21:27 +0000

Getting error in :-
var str:String=”fl.transitions.Tween”;
var obj=getDefinitionByName(str) as Class;
trace(obj);

why this is coming only in fl package

By: N

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:42:50 +0000

example not working…

By: Jeremy Daley

Jeremy Daley — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:10:46 +0000

I’m not sure how the snippet:
var s:String = (new ClassReference(“foo=”) as String);

…is that handy. how would you give the variable a “String” type if it was suppose to be dynamic (or unknown) in the first place?

Am I interpreting that incorrectly?